NanLaew

Pretty obvious they are all waiting for you.

Yes, immersion learning is fantastic. During a break from work, I did three weekends immersion in Brazilian Portuguese at the University of Houston. This after struggling with the language on a job in Maranhão, up north where English speakers were sparse. When I went back for the subsequent tour of duty, the locals that I had been dealing with before were a bit dumbfounded as to why I had been so 'difficult' on my first gig. I went back to UH on my next break to do the next level of immersion training but after living the language in Brazil for the previous two months, the instructor reckoned I was way ahead enough of her current classes and not to bother with them. However, we did meet for a couple of lunch dates and she talked me into getting involved with calling her class members on the phone. This was also part of their immersion training; someone calls you speaking only Portuguese and you need to answer in the same langauge. Fun stuff but more fun was I ended up working for almost two years in Brazil.

When we relocated, my lad was denied enrollment in his new school's Intensive English Program because his existing English language skills were poor. This was due to the non-existent teaching of English in the Intensive English Program at his previous school. That was run by a 26 year-old English TEFL'er who insisted that my then 6 year-old was 'an underachiever' and maybe he should have his head checked. When I spoke with the Thai head of the English language department at the new school about this, it was easier to talk with her in Chinese as my Thai is rudimentary whilst she refused to even try speaking English. IEP's are a way of wringing more cash out of parents to pay for the extra salary of the 'supervising' teacher who plays with their phone for an hour. YMMV TiT

Really? That's all you see when you open up the aseannow home page? Strange...

Advice posted many years ago on the pattaya addicts forum suggested that real mongers never go back for seconds.

And then AI came along and pondered it more.

Too many checks and balances to get in the way. I want to win the lottery (and I am workimg on it) but that doesn't mean that I will. Anyway, at the risk of diluting this 3-alarm, Trump fire thread, here's a look at how a couple of the world's other most treasured democracies are finding that not keeping to their electoral promises and policies is coming back to bite them. "If the Labor parties in the UK and Australia, and the Democratic Party in the US, are to act as effective stabilizing forces in the future – as they have done for the past century – they must discard the elite ideologies that they are currently wedded to and become, to use Kim Carr’s phrase, “bold reformist parties.”..." https://www.rt.com/news/607472-western-working-class-votes-trump/

One man's opinion is another man's dogmatic assertion. Glad you worked that out by yourself.

Wow, and there was me thinking that the conservative's rabbit holes were mighty deep.

What "the left looks down their nose at" notwithstanding, they are what they are. The salt of the earth, down home, folksy sort. Bless 'em.

I will see your "radical progressive woke left" and raise you "dumb superficial gullible right"

Insert "Shhhh..." emoji [here]

You started it when you misrepresented the election results with this landslide nonsense. But OK, your other points are valid. The "traditional" swing states swung. With less than two weeks to go, mainstream media suddenly (desperately?) quoted polls that suggested North Carolina was going to flip and could carry Harris to victory (pending results in your "traditional" swing states). In the end, it wasn't even close in NC and of course the swingers swung and the rest is history. Apart from Carter and the first Obama term, the state has been red since Tricky Dicky. Not a snowball's chance in hell IMHO. That, to me, this colossal straw clutch was affirmation that the Democrats were going to be toast. It will be interesting to see if the pollsters get a firmer handle on predictions going forward, but somehow, I doubt it.

As I understand it, the only demographic that shifted a bit from Trump to Harris were white males with post graduate degrees, i.e. not dumb proles.

Yes, let's see if the importance of the mid-terms is lost on EITHER party. It's going to be interesting.

PA is the perpetual SWING state. It has flipped 10 times in the past 70 years. Historically, it has seen more Republican electoral votes than Democrat. It's never been a blue state.

Don't get me wrong. The Democrats thankfully lost and the Republicans won. Now, let's see how the next two years work out for the president-elect.

Did it flip though? Anyway, it looks like I've got you furiously googling for maps. Good boy. Much appreciated.

Don't disengage quite yet. Maybe your thread is a tad premature as they swarm to slather themselves in the myth of the landslide that never was. All this while they furiously doggie-paddle away in their shallow pool of intellectual mediocrity.

You see what you had to do there? You had to qualify your big win with "barring the deep blue states". Now, if one of them had been flipped, then THAT would have made the win epically landslidey. Bigly even.

Excellent summation of the Democrats worldview and not just the OP's. The party allowed Biden to be nominated when he was already beyond his use-by date. Everything they've done since then has only been varying degrees of damage limitation.

Harris only had 108 days to get her sh*t together, versus the almost two years since Trump declared his candidacy. Their profligacy wasn't unexpected when they need to throw everything and the kitchen sink at the task. I think the Australian vernacular would be "running around like a headless chook"? I agree that theirs was a pretty hopeless task, especially when the campaign managers appeared focussed on the woman's vote while offered absolutely nothing to counter any of Trump's very bold proclamations of what he would do while himself not offering any substance as to how he would actually do it. Now, whether that was Harris's telling them what she wanted (unlikely), or the grandees of the Democrat party telling her what they wanted (probably), despite MSM pulling 11th hour, must-win swing states like NC and the importance of their Gen Z voters out of their butts, the result was fairly predictable. Well done the red team and...good luck America.

How wonderfully and woefully simplistic. Huge swathes of a state where mostly nobody lives are red. Great fishing in AK though. Context: 48.2% of the American electorate didn't vote red. That's almost half. 50% of the American electorate voted red. That's only half. Now, with regard to the latter, what does fifty/fifty mean? The answer isn't "landslide" either.

Not a landslide. Hope this helps.